Cyndi Lauper working out the kinks in 'Kinky Boots'

Billy Porter, left, who plays the role of Lola, rehearses a scene with Stark Sands, right, who plays the role of Charlie Price, and other members of the cast of "Kinky Boots" at the New 42nd Street Studios in New York.

BRIAN HARKIN, Chicago Tribune

BRIAN HARKIN, Chicago Tribune

NEW YORK - The New 42nd Street Studios, where many Broadway musicals rehearse, are full of drama. Once at this very address, a hung-over Billy Joel spilled coffee all over a furious Twyla Tharp's sacred dance floor. And if, some warm September Saturday, you find yourself sharing an elevator with a couple of chatty dancers confounded by the ability of glitter to hold persistently to the body after at least three showers, well it's just another ordinary day at this particular theater factory, where hoofers kvetch on every floor. Hey, when you're playing a drag queen eight shows a week, clingy glitter is a very real issue.

These studios actually are just north of Manhattan's famous garment and fashion districts. But before rehearsals for new musical "Kinky Boots" moved in this fall, along with the pop star Cyndi Lauper, the much-esteemed writer Harvey Fierstein (an expert on glitter himself, and a poet of what it leaves behind), and the exuberant director-turned-choreographer Jerry Mitchell, these venerable rooms surely had never been filled with so many shoes.

The rack after rack of footwear — loafers, Oxfords, Dr. Martens, boots — crowding out the actors in the space, did not belong to Lauper, a girl always having fun, but was there to allow the diverse cast of an all-new Broadway musical, upon whose broad shoulders and long legs many hopes of the otherwise limp 2012-13 Broadway season rest, to get used to populating a factory in Northern England that lives and dies by soles and uppers.

Along with the shoes came the machinery for mass-producing them: custom conveyor belt units that look like terrifyingly oversize treadmills, but can be pushed together (or flung apart) to make an assembly line upon which shoes can travel and invading drag queens and bemused shoe-factory workers can dance, maybe even together.

When a visitor inquired about the provenance of these bizarre, seemingly self-contained machines, a stage manager leaned over and explained that the actors were actually switching them on and off, that they (the machines, not the actors) were equipped with their own air-assisted braking system, and that these were indeed the real things that would be transported out of town with "Kinky Boots," which begins previews this week in Chicago at the Bank of America Theatre.

"The batteries alone cost, like, $16,000 each," the stage manager said in her visitor's ear, sotto voce. "Believe me, these aren't just for rehearsal."

"After I saw the film, I knew had to have them if I was to bring this thing to life," Mitchell interjected, as an impossible tall and lean dancer sailed by on one of the conveyor belts, glittering and looking like a horizontal pretzel, yet to be twisted. "So I said, let's just build these puppies."

What Jerry wanted — after the producer Daryl Roth sent him a DVD of the 2005 British movie (directed by Julian Jarrold and starring mostly unknowns) about a struggling, family-owned shoe factory that is saved from going out of business after its young boss, Charlie, comes up with the idea of creating custom fetish-type footwear for drag artists — Jerry mostly got.

Aside from the contraptions that torture dancers — and bring to life a factory floor in what looks like it will be one of the more interesting conflagrations of glittering campery and industrial grit in Broadway history — the Mitchell wish list included Fierstein, whom Mitchell had wanted, but failed to persuade, to write the book for "Legally Blonde" ("I just couldn't see it," the gravel-voiced wit would say later, in a Broadway watering hole, simultaneously grinning and rolling his eyes) and Lauper, who, despite having never written a stage musical in her life, seemed to both of these men to be a singular fit for this kind of material.

"Seriously," Lauper would say a little later that day, during a lengthy conversation — more accurately, a lengthy series of candid observations — about her life, work and times. "How much of a stretch is it for me to write songs about fashion, funny relationships, people changing their minds and shoes?"

The timing wasn't bad for Lauper, either. "I could have done something like this before," she said that afternoon, laughing. "But it would have wrecked my career. They'd never have let me back on pop radio."

Fierstein and Lauper were already friends. Mitchell had met Lauper when he'd choreographed a benefit for her ("I was worried," Lauper said, "I'm not Liza Minnelli.") and he'd decided that since she was a "True Colors" outsider and a rebel herself, she'd be ideal to write songs about nonconformists and strugglers who share a love of shoes. Lauper, who did not want to do something that made her "feel like a hack" was down with that.

"I am Lola," she declared, naming the drag queen whose arrival and footwear needs save the shoe factory and will be played in this show by Billy Porter. Plus, Mitchell well knew, Lauper not only had years of experience crafting a danceable tune, but actually is far smarter than some people think (one "Kinky Boots" lyric, for the record, compares and contrasts the "strength of Sparta' with the "patience of Job"). And then there is the little matter of her selling more than 50 million albums and 20 million singles, making the 59-year-old one of the best-selling artists of all time.

"I am a pop writer," Lauper said, eyes suddenly alive, that day, after being asked about one-third of the traditional question about making the transition of writing songs for the stage. Lyrics for musicals, after all, can't just be ever-intensifying restatements of a theme (a la, say, "True Colors") but are expected to actually move a particular story along in something close to a linear fashion. "Don't deny what you are," she said, now seemingly addressing herself. "You are what you are. You've been brought up with the suits telling you, 'Where's the hook?'"

At that point, Lauper, no fan of music-industry executives as a breed, switched into her suits voice, a kind of emasculated whine. "Oh Cyndi, that's very nice now, but how am I going to sell that?" She then curled her lip in disgust.

Suits or not, the selling of "Kinky Boots," the musical, will be an interesting challenge, as its producers are well aware. The show is still set in England, with everyone involved keenly conscious of the different choice that was made with a thematically similar British movie, "The Full Monty." It was moved to Pittsburgh in what most Broadway hands now view as a serious mistake.

Both Mitchell and Fierstein say that they don't want to overemphasize the potentially camp aspects of the "Kinky Boots" plot, perhaps scaring off straight men, a notoriously fickle group when it comes to buying theater tickets, but then again, they also don't want to apologize for the mascara, and nor do they want the show's humor and zest to be torpedoed by the dour business of an industrial factory fighting for its life in a struggling part of recession-smacked Britain. After all, that made things tougher for "Billy Elliot," another musical based on a British movie that not many people in America saw and that turned out, for all its brilliance on the stage, to be too rough and raw to turn a big profit

Asked to describe the intended tone of "Kinky Boots," Mitchell says that he wants it to "have the grit of 'Once' (the hip, earnest, understated 2012 Tony winner set in Dublin) "and the celebratory tone of 'La Cage Aux Folles,' the hit musical with which it happens to share a writer in Fierstein. That potential fusion, clearly, will be the sweet spot for which everyone here is reaching.

In the rehearsal that day, Porter and the well-regarded actor Stark Sands brought the contents, human and mechanical, of the rehearsal room to silence when they sang one of the show's most pivotal numbers, "I'm Not my Father's Son," a stirring ballad (and duet) wherein both Porter's Lola and Sands' Charlie, the young man confounded by his family factory's sudden demise, come to see that they share the problem of suffering the crippling expectations of an often cruel father. The song was written by Lauper, who came up with it in her head at home and then sang it into her iPhone, for the arranger, Stephen Oremus, to then write down and, eventually orchestrate. This is how Lauper composes.

Later in the bar that day, Fierstein said that the biggest difference between the movie and the show, aside from the drag queens singing as they pass along the assembly line, will be that the movie is, at its core, about the saving of a factory and the musical will be, at its core, about two young men who come from seemingly opposite worlds who figure out that they have a lot in common, beginning with the need to stand up to their dads. That, the "Kinky Boots" crew is thinking, is all the Americanization this story needs.

As for the score, Mitchell and Fierstein both say that they're charmed by Lauper's ability to write in distinct voices for the different characters — as compared, say, with the modern tendency for the composer's voice and style to trump all.

"I feel like I'm a little kid again, doing all the voices," Lauper said. "I never hung out with a lot of people when I was little. I'd go out at eight in the morning looking for someone to play with, but not wanting to find anybody. I am an outsider. I know what that life is like. At intermission of this show, if people were to go out and call their kids, then that would make me happy."

And thus it started to emerge that Lauper, despite her reputation as a provocateur, has poured a lot of herself into these songs, this project. And she's clearly invested in Mitchell's approval, particularly.

"You know,' Lauper said, after a pause, without waiting for a question, "in the 1980s, everyone dressed like me. You remember? Everyone. It felt like they'd sucked it up, spit it out. I thought, 'Oh my God, I've just had my clothes stolen from me.' That's what they try to do to you. But I didn't let them. I wanted to be my own person. To have the freedom any man had. ... Sure, I knew you had to be famous to do your gig, but I thought I could make the famous part fun."

There was another brief pause.

"But then," Lauper said, "they overbook you."

It's not a simple matter, this Lauper and her being overbooked business, given that there's actually a reality-TV crew filming Lauper around the "Kinky Boots" process (and headed to Chicago with the show), not to mention a new Lauper autobiography, just released this month. But in this instance, clearly, Lauper is booking herself, even as Mitchell, Fierstein and, above all, the dancers in her show seem to be worrying most about keeping the glitter in check without dulling its shine.